Frank commentary from a retired call girl

New Year’s Day 2013

The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings. – Charles Dickens, The Chimes

Let’s start this new year with a positive thought: I believe I can state with a fair degree of certainty that we’re now past the apex of the “sex trafficking” hysteria. This doesn’t mean that things will get steadily better from now on; in fact, they may get worse in some ways, as demonstrated by California’s recent passage of a law which defines a wide range of normal human activities as “sex trafficking” and then condemns “traffickers” to the “sex offender” registry for life. In “The Widening Gyre” I referred to the “trafficking” myth as “an increasingly-erratic cultural meme spinning wildly out of control, whose far-flung debris is going to cause a lot more damage before it finally disintegrates”, and now that it has entered this last and most dangerous phase we should expect to see a lot more people hurt even as ever-larger numbers of people speak out against it ever more vocally. Because it’s a useful tool of social control and a versatile excuse for tyranny, governments (especially the US government) will work hard and invest huge sums to continue the panic well beyond the time when it would have died naturally; that, however, can only work for so long, and once the edifice of prohibition starts to collapse the US will no more be able to halt the process than the communists could stop the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

…skepticism about “trafficking”…will slowly increase, and by about 2015 it will be possible for a major media outlet to publish articles critical of both the statistics and the very concept. By 2017 public funding for anti-sex worker hate groups will begin to dry up, and by 2019 or 2020 we should expect it to virtually disappear from public discourse except for a wave of books and documentaries by “experts” who couldn’t be bothered to speak out against it while it was going on but are happy to make a quick buck from it after it’s safely over. Sometime soon after this there may be a pro-sex work backlash against the hysteria, just as public atheism became much more palatable to general audiences after the death of the “Satanic Panic”. I suspect that at this point the ACLU will finally deign to take up a challenge to prostitution law, and sometime in the late 2020s the SCOTUS will issue a landmark decision overturning prostitution laws on civil rights grounds just as Roe vs. Wade overturned abortion laws and Lawrence vs. Texas overturned sodomy laws.

Nothing I’ve seen in the last year leads me to doubt that, or even to alter a word of it. Idealistic fools have prattled about the “end of history” for centuries, most recently in 1992 due to the fall of communism. But not only does history never end, it never even keeps going in the same direction for long (except for some fairly consistent long-term trends like increased technology and individual rights, and decreased violence). Prohibitionism is as much a flash in the pan as its sister communism was; it arrived on the scene about the same time and will exit, if I am correct, only a few decades later. And once it’s gone, nobody who cares about freedom and human dignity will mourn its passing any more than any rational, moral person mourns its late sibling.

11 Responses

Optimistic post! I like it. My own view though, is that sex worker rights will come about without much “fanfare” when the entitlement state unravels. In order to persecute people – you need $$$. When that runs out – Americans will have to start making priorities and worrying with what a young woman does with her private parts to make money in a post-apocalyptic America simply isn’t going to be a priority for them.

We’ve done nothing serious to fix the abuses, or prosecute the crimes that lead to the economic crash of 2008. The same crooks are still running Wall Street. They will plunder the public again, and again it will crash, and this time the government may not be able to rescue them.

When that happens, the government will concentrate on its core concerns, protecting it’s self and the rich. “”Services to many outlying areas will be cut, and those areas will have to figure out how to go it alone. Some will succeed, and I suspect those will not have a lot of heavy prohibitions on personal activities, there simply won’t be the resources.

I tend to suspect the opposite. There will continue to be a huge focus on laws against sinners, illegals, slackers, and other “others”. Gun rights, gay rights, pillow fights.

Distraction is key while the treasury of the people is raided for the benefit of the few. If people realized how little money was spent on public infrastructure and sevices vs subsidies for the powerful, they would not be happy.

Prohibition and moral panic helps maintain this uneven state of affairs. And it’s especially important after a large heist like we saw in 2008.

Well, that’s happening now – but the distractions will come to an end when the money dries up and people have to prioritize.

It’s not a mystery where government is spending it’s money – the info is readily available online. It’s simplistic to say we spend most of our money on subsidies and the powerful. For instance the 2011 federal budget …

As you can see – the biggest expenditures go to Medicare, Social Security, the DoD, Discretionary Spending and “other” mandatory spending. Interest on the debt is only at 6% right now but debt is racking up so fast that …

The urban institute has calculated that the average American receives over $200,000 MORE in Social Security and Medicare benefits than they paid into the program over a lifetime. This is unsustainable.

It really isn’t hard math – but it is a hard reality and there is no way we will escape it. Everyone alive today will feel the pain.

So if I’m to understand this correctly, Maggie has written a very optimistic post about a state of affairs I think we’d all like to see come to pass, yet all we can talk about is how our leaders (so-called or otherwise) are going to bring about the apocalypse?

I realize that our current crop of politicians and financiers have given us zero reasons to trust or even like them, but do we all really have that little faith in our fellow humans that the apocalypse is our only future?

Maggie on Twitter

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